New & Noteworthy Paperbacks

By Scott Veale

Published: January 28, 2001

WONDERS OF THE AFRICAN WORLD, by Henry Louis Gates Jr. Photographs by Lynn Davis. (Knopf, $24.95.) The Harvard professor and noted essayist draws on 30 years of experience visiting and studying Africa in this lively introduction to the continent's history and archaeology, which highlights the achievements of African societies from Timbuktu to Zanzibar. Originally a ''companion'' to a PBS series, the book is somewhat limited in scope, but ''Gates writes with concentration and clarity,'' William Langewiesche wrote in the Book Review in 1999.

MR. SPACEMAN, by Robert Olen Butler. (Grove, $12.) This novel's hero is Desi, a many-fingered, zoot-suit-wearing extraterrestrial who learns to speak a demented English by watching television and who beams up American earthlings to his spaceship to pick their brains. His mission is to reveal himself to the world on the eve of the millennium. ''Desi is the most likable, engaging and human of aliens,'' Geoff Nicholson said in these pages last year.

EDWARD ALBEE. A Singular Journey: A Biography, by Mel Gussow. (Applause, $16.95.) The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright is portrayed by a cultural critic for The New York Times as tenaciously self-assured despite his ragged record on Broadway, and remarkably candid about his many ups and downs. In 1999 our reviewer, Lawrence DeVine, called this ''a riveting biography.''

MOTHER NATURE: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species, by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. (Ballantine, $18.95.) A biologist and anthropologist (as well as a parent) questions some long-held assumptions about maternity, presenting encyclopedic evidence from history, literature and evolutionary science to support her theory that motherhood is neither instinctive nor automatic. ''This is not just a book for mothers but one that will stimulate and challenge anyone interested in the relationship between parents and children,'' Anne Magurran said here last year.

A STRANGER IN THE EARTH, by Marcel Theroux. (Harvest/Harcourt, $13.) Horace Littlefair is an amiably tweedy orphan who stumbles into London to take a job at an eccentric newspaper that at first glance resembles something cooked up by Evelyn Waugh. But this novel is less a satire than a kindhearted coming-of-age story that revels in its characters' predicaments and the messiness of life. It ''delights because it's never quite what you expect it to be,'' David Willis McCullough said here in 1999.

WHERE THE RAINBOW ENDS, by Jameson Currier. (Overlook, $14.95.) This first novel revolves around a group of gay friends and lovers as they mature from their exuberant, sexually liberated early days in 1970's Manhattan to more cautious, often painful, lives in the 1990's. ''Currier is adept at drawing a fine line between the erotic and the tragic,'' Erik Burns wrote here in 1999.

MOTH SMOKE, by Mohsin Hamid. (Picador USA, $13.) Set in modern-day Pakistan, this Gatsbyesque first novel traces the downward spiral of a young man who is resentful and mocking of the sybaritic jet set while desperate to join its ranks. The result is a ''brisk, absorbing'' tale that ''probes the vulgarity and violence that lurk beneath a surface of affluence and ease,'' Jhumpa Lahiri said in the Book Review last year. ''Hamid steers us from start to finish with assurance and care.''

HOMEMADE ESTHETICS: Observations on Art and Taste, by Clement Greenberg. (Oxford University, $15.95.) In a series of seminars at Bennington College in 1971, the influential art critic Clement Greenberg (1909-94) argues that taste matters above all in making aesthetic judgments. His book ''is studded with bright aper-->us, sharp critique and copious evidence of refreshingly honest taste formation,'' David Cohen wrote in these pages in 1999.

NOBROW: The Culture of Marketing -- the Marketing of Culture, by John Seabrook. (Vintage, $12.) Part memoir of a cultural consumer, part group portrait of today's ''culture capitalists'' in the entertainment industry, this book argues that a ''hierarchy of hotness'' has replaced traditional notions of quality. ''Seabrook is at his best in dryly sending up the artificiality and arbitrariness of life in the culture ministries,'' Alexander Star wrote here in 2000.

FORTUNE'S ROCKS, by Anita Shreve. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $13.95.) This unabashedly florid novel turns on the carnal education of a young girl who falls for a married doctor in a New Hampshire coastal town. The result ''is a slickly made confection for readers who want to laugh and cry at the noble struggle of the human heart,'' Albert Mobilio said here in 1999. Scott Veale